One television critic protested at the unveiling of a natural “mystery,” and complained that the series was an “intrusive delving into the sanctity of human life.”

The declared message is simply, “I don’t want to know.” But the wider implication is, “People in general should not be allowed to know these things.” Mystery equals fun, and by explaining mysteries you are taking all the fun out of life. Spoilsport!

I don’t know what answer these people would give if you asked them whose names should be on the priesthood list of those privileged to possess such forbidden knowledge. Would the mystifiers care to have an inflamed appendix removed by a surgeon who had kept himself uncorrupted by the sacred mysteries of the inner abdomen? Would they be happy to cross the Atlantic in a plane piloted by someone who thought the only qualification he needed was an appropriate sense of awe at the mysteries of flight?

I would guess that skeptics and scientists have been familiar with this kind of attitude for as long as there has been such a thing as science. The key phrase these days seems to be “a sense of wonder” — characterized as something you suddenly lose as soon as you learn something of the inner workings of some phenomenon.

Not even Nobel laureates are immune to these charges. A friend of physicist Richard Feynman once told him, “I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull.” (Feynman’s comment: “I think he’s kind of nutty.”) Later, Feynman explained, “First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people — and to me too, I believe . . . But at the same time, I see much more in the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells inside, which also have a beauty.”

On another occasion, he said, “For instance, the ancients believed that the earth was the back of an elephant that stood on a tortoise that swam in a bottomless sea. Of course, what held up the sea was another question . . . It was a poetic and beautiful idea. Look at the way we see it today. Is that a dull idea? The world is a spinning ball, and people are held on it on all sides, some of them upside down. And we turn like a spit in front of a great fire. We whirl around the sun. That is more romantic, more exciting . . . Or there are the atoms. Beautiful — mile upon mile of one ball after another ball in some repeating pattern in a crystal . . . What looks still to our crude eyes is a wild and dynamic dance.”

Richard Dawkins has made the point in another way: “I wish I could meet Keats or Blake to persuade them that mysteries don’t lose their poetry because they are solved. Quite the contrary. The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle . . .” Let’s say you’re watching a ventriloquist and enjoying the amusing repartee, when someone turns to you and whispers: “The other guy is just a dummy, you know. Not a real person.” Do you now leave in disgust, because the illusion has been spoiled forever? Or do you still find yourself turning your head from one performer to the other as they talk? If you really think rational explanation destroys a good illusion, I have bad news for the next time you attend a film or a play: the people in it are all pretending. There. Now I've ruined your theatre-going experience for the rest of your life. Haven't I?

Magicians can get very jumpy on the subject of explaining illusions. They have a stock set of dire predictions. “Nobody will ever come to see magic shows.” “Nobody will employ magicians again.” Sure. And David Copperfield is back on the bread line.

One of the weakest lines of argument is that little children are being deprived of their “sense of wonder” (here we go again): “Are you saying you would destroy a child’s belief in Santa Claus?” This last is offered as a knock-down argument with which no one could disagree. I have never understood why. The appearance of presents on a child’s birthday is not attributed to a secret delivery by a Birthday Fairy, and I have never heard a child complain because the gifts were handed over by the giver in person. As Tom Flynn puts it (in The Trouble with Christmas): “There is something disturbing in the length to which parents will go to fabricate physical evidence to support the Santa Claus myth. It is popular to call such deceptions ‘cute,’ but don’t they really amount to laying traps for youngsters’ emerging capacities for critical thinking?”

Scott Kim is perhaps best known for his ”Inversions” — words that can be read “right side up, upside down and every which way.” He once wrote: “When I was a child, magic fascinated me. I learned very young just how powerfully people’s attention can be misdirected. The only problem was that I always wanted to explain how the tricks were done. I wanted everyone to see how they were being fooled.” He then added something that some will find very hard to understand, but that sums up the whole issue neatly: “To understand the mechanism and still be entranced — that to me is the greatest magic.”

Thanks to modern mass media, old-fashioned spiritualism is undergoing something of a revival. Witness James Van Praagh’s bestselling Talking to Heaven (1997) and the talk-show popularity of Van Praagh and other mediums like Rosemary Altea, George Anderson, and John Edward.

Like Van Praagh before him, Edward was featured on the Larry King Live television show. King promoted Edward’s forthcoming video and book, both titled One Last Time — “meaning,” King explained, “saying good-bye to someone who is gone.”

Although purported communication with spirits of the dead is ancient (for example, the biblical Witch of Endor conjured up the ghost of Samuel at the request of King Saul [1 Sam. 28:7-20]), modern spiritualism began in 1848 at Hydesville, New York. Two young girls, Maggie and Katie Fox, pretended to communicate with the ghost of a murdered peddler. Although four decades later they confessed how their “spirit rappings” had been faked, in the meantime spiritualism had spread like wildfire across the United States and beyond. The great magician and escape artist Harry Houdini (1874-1926) spent the last years of his life crusading against phony spirit mediums and exposing their bogus “materializations” and other physical phenomena such as spirit photography.

A case I investigated in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1985 illustrates the dangers that fake mediums risk in producing such phenomena. Laboratory analyses of certain “spirit precipitations” (Figure 1) revealed the presence of solvent stains, and a recipe for such “productions” from the book The Psychic Mafia (Keene 1976) — utilizing a solvent to transfer images from printed photos — enabled me to create similar spirit pictures (Figure 2). With this evidence, as well as affidavits from a few sëance victims, I was able to obtain police warrants against the medium, who operated from the notorious Indiana spiritualist center Camp Chesterfield (Nickell with Fischer 1988).

Figure 1: Alleged “spirit precipitations” on cloth, produced at a 1985 sëance.

Figure 2: Images produced experimentally by author.

Today’s mediums — whether charlatans, fantasy-prone personalities, or a bit of both — tend to eschew such physical phenomena. On my visits to New York’s spiritualist community, Lily Dale, I have been told that all such productions are now effectively prohibited there due to fakery in the past. Anyone claiming to produce authentic physical phenomena — like floating trumpets, slate writing, or apports (objects allegedly transported by spirits) — must pass the scrutiny of a committee. As a consequence, the dark-room sëance is becoming a thing of the past.

Like the mediums at Lily Dale (Figure 3), Van Praagh, Edward, and most others now limit themselves to the other major category of spiritualist offerings: “mental phenomena,” the purported use of “psychic ability” such as clairvoyance (inner sight), clairaudience (perceived voices), and clairsentience (extrasensory feelings) to obtain messages from the spirit realm.

Because such mediums avoid the tricks of producing physical phenomena, it is more difficult to expose spiritualist charlatans — that is, to distinguish between mediums who practice intentional deception and those who may be self-deceived (believing they really communicate with the dead). What can be done, however, is to focus not on the medium’s motives but on his or her ability, such as by setting up suitable scientific tests (e.g. to measure supposed clairvoyance) or by analyzing a medium’s readings.

Figure 3: A medium giving readings at an outdoor service at Lily Dale, the western New York spiritualist colony. (photo by Joe Nickell)

When I appeared on radio programs to debate James Van Praagh (on “The Stacy Taylor Show,” San Diego, May 19) and Dorothy Altea (on “The Gil Gross Show,” New York, June 15), I began by inviting each to contact a deceased relative whom I named. Both declined my very open-minded invitation, saying they had nothing to prove to skeptics. (At one point I remarked to Van Praagh that I believed I could contact spirits as well as he — meaning not at all. He missed my point and challenged me to do a reading for him! I responded that I visualized the spirit of Abraham Lincoln who was telling me that Van Praagh had never contacted anyone “over there.” Van Praagh did not think this was funny.)

I did obtain a transcript of John Edward’s “spirit” pronouncements on Larry King Live (June 19, 1998), and the results are revealing. They suggest that if Edward really does communicate with the dead, the spirit world must be populated with entities who have little to do but heed the call of self-promoting mystics. And while they seem able to appear virtually on demand, irrespective of distance, they must have lost many of their other faculties — being plagued with poor vision, impaired speech, and faulty memory.

Consider the reading Edward gave to the very first caller on Larry King Live, a woman who wanted to contact her mother. “O.K., Linda,” says the glib Edward, “the first thing I want to talk about is, I know you’re looking for your mom, but I'm getting an older male who’s also there on the other side. I feel like this is somebody who would be above you, which means it’s like a father figure, or an uncle, and he passes from either lung cancer or emphysema, tuberculosis; it’s all problems in the chest area.” Edward continues: “O.K., that’s the first thing. And I feel like there’s a J- or a G-sounding name attached to this.”

Happily for Edward, Linda responds, “That’s my mother.” Unfortunately, despite the “hits” the woman is willing to credit, Edward is wrong on both counts, since he was not talking about the mother but some “father figure” Linda is unable to recognize. Edward does not correct the error, but proceeds. “She’s got a very dominant personality” (as most mothers are no doubt perceived by their offspring), and again Linda offers, “That’s my mother. Her first name starts with ‘G’ and she had emphysema.” Thus far, Linda’s persistent credulity notwithstanding, Edward has scored only one very weak hit but two clear misses, a foreshadowing of his overall performance.

Edward frequently asks questions — a ploy used by other self-styled mediums and psychics. By the information being provided in interrogative form it may, if correct, be considered a hit but otherwise will seem an innocent query. Questioning also keeps the reader from proceeding very far down a wrong path. And so Edward asks, “Does the month of August have a meaning for her, or the eighth of a month?” When Linda replies, “Not that I know of,” Edward uses another standard ploy, telling her to “write this down” and becoming even more insistent. This positive reinforcement diverts attention from the failure and gives the caller (or sitter) an opportunity to discover a meaning later.

Repeatedly, Edward offers data that is subject to many interpretations. With Linda, he returns to an earlier point, insisting that her mother’s spirit “is telling me that there’s a father figure that’s there, so I don’t know if your father’s passed [emphasis added] but there’s a father-type figure.” Still, Linda is unable to make the connection, replying, “No, my father — I just spoke to him on my son’s phone . . . . ” Edward helpfully suggests “a father-in-law” or at least “a male figure who’s there” but Linda still doesn't seem able to verify the claim.

Edward is bailed out of his dilemma by Larry King, who interrupts: “But the important thing is, how is she doing?” This gives Edward the opportunity to tell Linda, “Your mom is fine” — offering what I call a “moot statement” (one that cannot be proved or disproved).

In all, Edward gave eighteen brief readings on the show, offering (apart from a few ramblings) some 125 statements or pseudostatements (i.e. questions). As I score them, there were four instances of Edwards being unable to make contact or supply an answer and twenty-four unverified and sixteen moot statements. I counted forty-one misses. There were about the same number of hits, forty-two (only 33.6 percent of the total). Or perhaps I should say apparent hits: most, thirty-four, of these were weak hits (as when Edward envisioned “an older female,” with “an M-sounding name,” either an aunt or grandmother, he said, and the caller supplied “Mavis” without identifying the relationship).

Just six of the statements seemed worthy of being termed moderate hits. (For example, Edward told a caller, “there’s a dog who’s passed also,” and she responded by saying her mother “had a dog that passed.” I rated this only a moderate hit since dogs are common pets.) And there were just two statements I felt might be deserving of the unqualified label “hit.” (Edward asked a caller, who was seeking her husband, “Did you bury him with cigarettes?” and when she responded in the affirmative, queried, “Was this the wrong brand?” The information does seem rather distinctive, but in both instances was phrased as a question and the second one was, of course, a follow-up.)

As these results indicate, John Edward was incorrect about as often as he was right. And considering the weaknesses of his ostensible hits, his success seems little better than might be obtained from guessing. By taking advantage of human nature, simple probabilities, the opportunities for multiple interpretations, and the technique of asking questions as a means of directing the reading, among other techniques, mediums like John Edward may give the impression they are communicating with the dead. The evidence, however, indicates otherwise.

References

• Keene, M. Lamar (as told to Allen Spraggett). 1976. The Psychic Mafia. New York: St. Martin.
• Nickell, Joe, with John F. Fischer. 1988. Secrets of the Supernatural. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, pp. 47-60.
• Van Praagh, James. 1997. Talking to Heaven. New York: Dutton.